Pros:Most affordable DVD-Audio creation tool on the market. Easy to learn and use.Cons:Produces only "dark" audio-only discs. Lack of file-compression features limits sample rate of multichannel tracks.Bottom Line:The latest entry in Minnetonka's discWelder line of DVD-Audio authoring applications offers only the most basic functionality. But it's still far and away the cheapest and simplest tool for creating simple DVD-Audio discs.

ReviewThe market may be crammed with programs that make it easy to produce great-looking DVD-Video discs, but creating a commercial DVD-Audio title remains an intricate...
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Minnetonka discWelder Bronze

The market may be crammed with programs that make it easy to produce great-looking DVD-Video discs, but creating a commercial DVD-Audio title remains an intricate process that often requires specialized $20,000 authoring systems. That's why we were so excited to discover Minnetonka's discWelder Bronze, the first DVD-Audio production tool to break the $500 barrier.

Unfortunately, discWelder Bronze's unprecedented $99 list price and consumer focus have necessitated more than a few compromises. Bronze implements only a small portion of the DVD-Audio specification, producing discs that are more like higher-fidelity multichannel audio CDs than true interactive audio/video productions. It offers no way to incorporate still images or video clips, build menus, or preview content before burning it to disc, and its lack of recording capabilities means that you'll need to use third-party products such as Sony's Sound Forge audio editor or the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound board to generate high-resolution audio content. Although the DVD-Audio specification permits nine Groups of up to 99 tracks per album, Bronze permits only one 99-track Group. Furthermore, the program offers few layout and recording options beyond naming tracks and albums, erasing rewritable media, setting the length of gaps between tracks, and verifying burned discs.

The discWelder Bronze program also lacks support for DVD-Audio's standard Meridian Lossless Packing compression algorithm, a constraint that limits the sample rates and bit depths of multichannel content. Most commercial DVD-Audio discs contain ultrahigh-quality audio5.1-channel, 24-bit, 96-kHz files, commonly written 24/96but without compression, the resulting audio stream would exceed the medium's 9.6-Mbps maximum bit rate. Consequently, Bronze automatically down-samples higher-resolution multichannel files to a lower bit-rate format, such as 24/48 or 24/44.1. These issues don't affect two-channel tracks, which even at 24/192 resolution don't require compression to remain within spec.

You'll need only a few minutes to become familiar with Bronze's simple drag-and-drop interface. Like most CD- and DVD-premastering applications, it lets you create a disc layout by simply dragging media files from a Windows Explorer-style pane. Bronze can import uncompressed mono and stereo files in AIFF and WAV format and lets you create multichannel content by dragging up to six mono files to a single track. Every channel in a track must have the same format, but each track can have a different sample rate and bit depth. Once you've assembled your track listing, a single click renders it into a disc image and burns the content to disc.

During our hands-on evaluation, discWelder Bronze was fast, stable, and easy to use. It had no problem burning projects to single-layer DVD±R and DVD±RW media (Minnetonka plans double-layer support as well), and our test discs worked flawlessly in all the DVD-Audio-compatible set-top boxes and computer drives we played them in. Our 3.2-GHz Pentium 4 testbed and Plextor PX-708UF rewriter (a dual-format DVD writer) required just over 25 minutes to render and burn a 3.0GB disc to Verbatim 8X DVD+R media.

Although discWelder Bronze is a simple program that does only one thing, it does that one thing well. If you want to create professional DVD-Audio titles, you'll need to spend considerably more money to obtain all the necessary authoring tools and licenses. But if you're simply looking for a way to record 24/192 stereo or 24-bit multitrack audio to DVD, or you want to exploit the medium's 4.37-GB capacity to squeeze huge amounts of lower-resolution recordings onto a single disc, you won't find a better solution, even at four times the price.

Bottom Line: Upgrading from McAfee Internet Security to McAfee Total Protection gets you a file encryption utility and extra licenses for the password manager. Unless you need those features, you may be better off with McAfee AntiVirus Plus.

Minnetonka discWelder Bronze

Minnetonka discWelder Bronze

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